UK - Europe's social network addicts

British people visit social networking sites more than their peers in Germany and France, according to figures Wednesday.

By
Jeremy Kirk
| 11 Oct 07

More than three-quarters of British internet users regularly visited social networking sites in August, outpacing their peers in Germany, France, Spain and Italy, according to figures released on Wednesday from comScore Networks.

UK internet users spent an average of almost six hours during the month visiting sites such as Facebook.com and Bebo.com, comScore said. The top 20 per cent of UK visitors spent 22 hours at the sites.

By contrast, slightly less than half of online users in France and Germany used social networking sites in August. Germans spent an average of 3.1 hours per user on the sites, and the French two hours per user.

A higher proportion of Spanish web surfers visited social networking sites - about 61 per cent - but they clocked up an average of only 1.8 hours per month. In Italy, 49 per cent of internet users visited the sites and spent an average of 1.8 hours there.

Last week comScore said Facebook.com was the fastest growing internet property in the UK. The site grew 18.3 per cent in August to reach just under nine-million unique visitors.

UK users spend more time on the social networking sites for a couple reasons, said Jamie Gavin, a comScore spokesman. The UK is a mature internet market, with more and more people using the internet for reasons other than e-commerce or banking, he said.

Also, most of the major social networking sites were launched first in English, and companies behind those sites have been slow to create local language versions, Gavin said.

The European social networking community stood at 127.3m unique visitors in August, or 56 per cent of the European online population.

ComScore compiles its data from people aged over 15 who agreed to put monitoring software on their computer that records their surfing habits. About two million users worldwide participate in the program.